Giving your tech a health check and strengthening it will be the first thing you’ll want to do to face the next few months. No matter what your final objective for the Holiday Season is, correct measurement, improving your relevancy, and enhancing your relationship with customers will be of the utmost importance. ‍

But how do you get to this?

Building seamlessly-working technology has a two-fold purpose:

• So your business gets the best out of measurement and can develop better & more relevant marketing strategies;
• So you improve your customers’ experience and earn their trust & loyalty: adjust your campaign strategy according to your insights.
  

For your business: enhancing measurement & developing better marketing strategies

Pixel, Google Tag & SDK integrations

Actions that happen on your website—such as purchases, add to cart and add to wish list—are reported by the Facebook Pixel, Google Tag & SDK integrations. The three tools are handy to measure the actions your customers take, especially to access insights and, later on, develop new strategies such as reaching these particular customers with Custom Audiences.  

Just like the Facebook Pixel (which you can read more about here), the Google Tag Manager allows you to collect specific data according to triggers (similar to the actions described by Facebook). This data can later be used for Google Analytics, a visual representation of your campaign statistics.‍

Insights and benefits you can get from these tracking systems are:‍

• Defining when customers convert after seeing the ad you’ve placed on Facebook, Instagram & Google;
• Tracking any incomplete actions (such as adding to cart but not purchasing);
• Creating Custom Audiences so that you can retarget these people;
• Allowing our algorithm to track these conversions and thus improve delivery.
  

For the Holiday Season, integrating or checking the Facebook Pixel will grant you access to the most relevant insights and will thus help you reach the ultimate goal: purchases!

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is indeed an excellent form of reaching customers who use Search Engines such as Google to search for products or services. But who doesn’t, really? Everyone uses them these days! Here, technology is making you a big favour. Thanks to SEO, users that introduce specific keywords will be led to your website.

What are the benefits? Well, apart from growing a social media presence, you’ll also build an online presence. Actually, users who are actively looking for your or similar products to yours are the ones who’ll look on Search Engines. This means more chances of conversions!‍

Offline Conversions

It might happen that, instead of having a webshop, you sell products in a physical store. But there’s no need to worry; Online Conversions will help you measure transactions that occur in-store after people have seen your ads.

What are the benefits, then?

Connecting your in-store sales to Facebook will enable you to build Custom Audiences that will help you reach specific segments of your shoppers (e.g. your biggest spenders or shoppers of a specific category), and also Lookalike Audiences to target people who look similar to these. Click here to read more & learn how to set this up.

Likewise, importing offline conversions to Google will give you an insight on which keywords and targeting criteria drive your customers to your store. Just to recap, Google Ad’s system works based on keywords you select for your campaigns, which means your ad will be shown when users search for those terms. This link will tell you how to make it work.

This can be of excellent use to measure and optimise campaigns during the Holiday Season. Which shoppers are more prone to buying this specific product? Which customers tend to spend more? Make your delivery far more meaningful and access a more detailed analysis of your audience to drive the best results in this marvellous time of the year!

So far, we’ve seen how to make the best out of measurement and enhance marketing strategies such as audience targeting. But now we’ll see how pre-Holiday Season tech checks will provide your customers with a more remarkable experience and thus drive more results.‍

Product feeds

Have you got a webshop or a store that sells, for example, clothing or jewellery? Do you feel your ads are not being delivered to the right people? Product catalogues/feeds are here to solve this problem.

Product catalogues/feeds enable you to not only show an overview of the products you offer but also to create dynamic ads. For instance, a 20-year-old girl who’s actively searched for pink clothing once will be targeted with pink products from your product feed. Isn’t it brilliant?

Wondering how to create catalogues and feeds? This article on our Help Centre will tell you all about it.

Furthermore, if you’re asking yourself what the benefits of dynamic ads are, check out this blog post from our website!

For your customers: improve their experience & earn their trust

Presence on Messenger

Predictably, the Holiday Season is the busiest time of the year for businesses. Customers are filled with questions that they’ll want you to answer as quickly as possible. Little by little, emails are being left behind and thus replaced by live chat services such as Messenger. This addition to your business will be the perfect solution for those desperate customers seeking for an almost instant answer that goes straight to the point.

What does this presence consist of?

Statistics from Facebook have shown that 65% of holiday shoppers are far more likely to purchase products from companies that offer a personalised messaging experience. And this doesn’t only include answering Frequently Asked Questions, but it also involves guiding your customer through the shopping process. For example, letting customers know about seasonal offerings through questions and prompts will encourage purchases. By the same token, you can send out coupons or offers and share the location of your physical store to drive foot traffic.

Work on the seamless nature of your customers’ experience

Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘I was going to purchase, but the process became too complex, so I dropped it’?

Yes, you probably have. Some businesses offer excellent, good-quality products or services, but the way they present them isn’t smooth, nor is it easy to understand. Or worse, they can’t purchase these products or services from other devices such as mobile.

Nowadays, the expectations amongst mobile-first consumers and their demands for good-quality services have increased dramatically. As a result, having a friction-less service will offer you a competitive edge.

Yet, not only will you be required to offer a seamless service, but you’ll also need to ensure the customer’s experience is too. As mentioned by Facebook’s statistics, consumption has changed, for ‘mobile holiday shopping has increased globally year on year by 22%’. This means that your priorities as a business have also steered somewhere else: now, the focus must be on offering a friction-less mobile experience.

So, what have we learnt?

For this year’s Holiday Season, we need to prepare our tech, for both your business’s and customers’ sake. Ensuring you’ve got your Pixel installed and working correctly, implementing Offline Conversions, increasing your presence on Messenger, and making your customer’s experience seamless are ways of making the most out of the Holiday Season.

Building a friction-less future, as Facebook calls it, also includes broadening your horizons. A seamlessly-working campaign will not only include one placement, but it will also require you to expand your reach. If you’re used to advertising on Facebook, why not try Instagram?

I know it might sound odd since, according to our common knowledge, the more you’ve got, the more complicated it gets. I feel here it’s the other way round: the more you strengthen your tech and thus include solutions, the more seamless it gets!

Need some help? As a Facebook Partner and Google Premier Partner, The Next Ad will assist you with getting your tech up and running. Feel free to get in touch with us to discover what we can do for you!